


Paint Yourself A Different Color

by stevergrsno (noxlunate)



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Depression Makeover, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, Hair Dyeing, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-26
Updated: 2019-03-26
Packaged: 2019-12-18 08:04:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18245762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noxlunate/pseuds/stevergrsno
Summary: “It’s called Aquamarine,” Steve insists instead of deigning to give a real answer. He’s spent a good chunk of time staring at the change in the mirror. He looks a little like he rolled around in a mermaid themed pinterest board, but also a little like he rolled around in a swamp. He thinks he might be okay with that.“You’re a mess,” Natasha says.“I think I’m doing what your generation calls ‘channeling my inner mermaid,’” Steve says, ruffling a hand through his hair. Now that it’s dry it feels deceptively soft and he has to ignore the part of him that says the next logical step is making Bucky feel for himself.In which Steve, post Infinity War, gives himself a depression makeover.





	Paint Yourself A Different Color

**Author's Note:**

> Hi please enjoy this short lil diddy I wrote at like 2 am over the course of two nights about Steve Rogers going full depression makeover mode and dying his hair blue.

Millennials, Steve will insist until his dying day- whenever that rolls around- did not invent the concept of changing their appearance when things go wrong. 

Steve remembers the night Becca called it off with her boyfriend and she chopped her hair off until it was short enough it made Winifred cry the next day when she discovered it. He remembers her changing her whole face with makeup and then turning it onto Steve because “Sometimes, Steve, when everything is fucked, it helps to feel like someone else for awhile.” 

And it had. Becca Barnes smearing lipstick onto his mouth and mascara onto his lashes had been a fitting distraction for Steve at sixteen, devastated and not sure why when Bucky was out with whatever girl had been on his arm that particular night. And it was also, apparently a good enough distraction for Becca herself after Tommy Callaghan decided to break her heart by fooling around with Alice two blocks over. 

(Steve and Bucky beat the tar out of Tommy Callaghan the next day and didn’t regret it for one single second. Steve didn’t regret shoving Bucky up against the wall of a building an alleyway over either. Didn’t regret kissing him for the first time, or the second or the third, until they were stumbling back to Steve’s place, shoulders bumping and hands brushing and laughter ringing through the Brooklyn streets until it turned into something else, safe within Steve’s apartment walls.)

Steve bets that humans have been fucking with their appearance every time the world screws with their hearts since the dawn of cosmetics. 

So no, millennials didn’t invent the goddamn wheel of regrettable emotional changes, but they do seem to have perfected it to enough of an art form that Steve only has to take a seven minute walk to get to a beauty supply store where he buys a packet of bleach, a bottle of developer, and a pair of scissors from a sympathetic looking young woman with purple hair. 

“Rough day?” The woman asks, and Steve finds the nametag on her chest. It says her name is Ravine and Steve spends .5 seconds questioning it before accepting it with the sort of grim acceptance he’d accepted quinoa as a food people apparently think is good. 

“How do you like your hair?” He asks instead of answering that question. Half the universe is dead, including Bucky and Sam. Steve’s pretty sure he’s having a rough fucking  _ life  _ these days. 

Ravine seems to take that as an invitation to gush about her hair, to detail all the colors she’s dyed it so far and how much she loves it, and it’s enough that Steve impulsively adds a little bottle of something called Aquamarine to his purchase. 

 

Between the directions on the back of the packet of bleach and google, Steve thinks he knows what he’s doing well enough. The problem with this being an impulse decision however is that it means he hadn’t exactly known what to get, which means he managed to forgot any of the things that would be useful to this endeavor. Things like brushes, or even gloves . So he uses a plastic fork from last night’s takeout to stir it up and his hands to glop the mixture onto his hair. 

It stings a little where the bleach makes contact with his skin. Actually, it burns like a motherfucker, but he figures this body is good for healing everything but the ache in his chest that has yet to go away since hearing Bucky’s confused  _ ‘Steve’  _ and realizing Sam turned to dust alone. 

It might as well be good for  _ something  _ if it keeps failing at all the important things. 

 

The bleach washes out and leaves his hair feeling dry and brittle and Steve doesn’t think he’s melodramatic, not really, but he’s also pretty sure there’s an analogy there. 

The result seems a little patchy, lighter in bits than in others, and Steve’s not sure if that matters to the final product or not, but also, if it turns out a disaster he’s pretty sure he can get away with just shaving it all off and starting again. 

 

The dye stains his whole hands teal and Steve gets it all over his ears and forehead and bathroom despite doing his best not to. It smells like grapes however, and Steve finds it immensely satisfying to cover his whole damn head in the stuff, squishing the dye into the strands until they’re saturated like the nice woman in the youtube tutorial told him to. 

When he’s done his bathroom is a mess and he’s pretty sure his bathtub will be blue permanently. He can’t be too fussed about it though, considering he’s pretty sure he already lost the security deposit for the place when he punched through the kitchen wall on Bucky’s birthday. 

His hair is blue, and his bathroom is blue, and it’s probably dramatic to say the outsides match his insides, but it feels sort of fitting and freeing at the same time. 

 

He realizes later, while staring himself down in the mirror with a pair of scissors, that no matter how many google searches he does, he doesn’t know how to cut hair. 

He calls Natasha and he can hear the roll of her eyes over the phone, but he can also hear Tony in the background, chattering a mile a minute to someone and the clear relief in her voice at the chance to get away from that. 

 

“What the fuck did you do to your hair Rogers?” Natasha asks as she barges into Steve’s apartment the moment the door swings open. 

“It’s called _ Aquamarine _ ,” Steve insists instead of deigning to give a real answer. He’s spent a good chunk of time staring at the change in the mirror. He looks a little like he rolled around in a mermaid themed pinterest board, but also a little like he rolled around in a swamp. He thinks he might be okay with that. 

“You’re a mess,” Natasha says. 

“I think I’m doing what your generation calls ‘channeling my inner mermaid,’” Steve says, ruffling a hand through his hair. Now that it’s dry it feels deceptively soft and he has to ignore the part of him that says the next logical step is making Bucky feel for himself. 

It shouldn’t be so hard, not having him right there. He hasn’t been  _ right there  _ for Steve to bother in years, has either been where Steve couldn’t find him or a world away in Wakanda. 

“I’m taking away your internet,” Natasha says, but there’s a quirk to the corner of her lips, a clear sign that she’s more amused than she wants Steve to know she is. 

“I need you to cut my hair,” Steve says and Natasha, whose current hair Steve knows is the result of a grocery store meltdown that ended in buying a box of hair dye and therefore leaves her with no room to judge Steve’s life choices, doesn’t say no. 

 

“You know, I’m glad you’re embracing the future and living like someone your age and all, but changing your hair doesn’t  _ actually  _ fix anything,” Natasha says, firing up a pair of clippers that she’d magic-ed out of her purse. 

Steve says “I know,” and “getting everyone back is going to be what fixes everything,” and the conversation dies with the first slide of the clippers against his scalp. 

 

When Natasha’s finished she ruffles a hand through his hair and turns him around to face the mirror. 

There’s hair all over his bathroom floor, chunks of bright teal and a greenish swamp color where Steve hadn’t gotten the bleach quite right, and tiny little strands of hair itching the back of his neck, but the sides of his head are shaved down short and the top is longer and a little fluffy from where Natasha has run her fingers through it. 

Steve thinks he looks like any other asshole on the street. 

Steve thinks Bucky would give him hell for it. Would knot his hands in Steve’s hair and tease him about how he looks like a real 21st century artist now. Maybe he’d joke about Steve going to art school to match the look, say it in the way that Steve knows means he wishes he  _ would,  _ that he’d give all this up and try to be normal for five seconds of their lives. 

Steve’s fingers itch to send a picture, to find out what he thinks, because parts of him still can’t quite remember that he’s not on the other side of a screen, ready to tease him about his terrible new hair and read him his itemized list of complaints about goats. 

“What do you think?” Natasha asks, still fiddling with Steve’s hair, fluffing up bits of it and smoothing other parts down, a critical eye directed at her work. 

“I think-” Steve pauses, staring at himself in the mirror, thinking about Sam telling him to find out what makes him happy, to find things he  _ likes.  _

Something loosens a little- some jagged piece of pain that’s been lodged deep in his chest- and it doesn’t necessarily feel  _ better,  _ but it feels a little easier to manage for a moment.

“I think I like it.” 

  
  


When Bucky comes back, when the dust has settled and the work is, if not done, then at least paused for the moment. When he’s finally  _ home,  _ he drags Steve down onto their couch and smooths a hand through Steve’s hair, tugging at the strands gently like it’s the first time he’s properly seeing it. 

“What’s all this about?” Bucky asks, running a hand through Steve’s hair, something soft and fond playing across his face. 

“It turns out I was a little bit of a mess without you,” Steve says, tipping into Bucky’s touch, letting his eyes fall closed when Bucky’s hand smooths down over the fuzz on his jaw. 

“Guess I just need to not leave you alone again then, huh?” 

“God. Yes. Stay with me.  _ Please.”  _ He sounds desperate. He  _ feels  _ desperate. But it’s been- God, it’s been  _ so fucking long  _ and he’s lost Bucky  _ too many times.  _ He thinks, maybe, it’s okay if he lets himself be a little desperate. 

Bucky’s arms wrap around him, tight like a vice, squeezing hard enough Steve really feels it, and when he speaks it’s straight into Steve’s temple, lips brushing over the skin there, “I will Steve. I will. I’m not going anywhere.” 

Steve takes a breath, lets it out, lets himself believe, even just for a moment, that that’s a promise Bucky can keep. 

“Okay,” He says, and then, sliding his hands into Bucky’s hair and pulling him in, kissing him hard, “Okay. Okay. I believe you.” 

 

“I’m retiring,” Steve says months and months later, when the world seems to have settled again. 

“Steve Rogers, backing down from a fight? Color me surprised,” Bucky says, something teasing there while he wields a brush and a bowl of hair dye that he’s meticulously coating Steve’s hair in while Steve sits at his mercy in the middle of their kitchen. 

“Not much to fight these days,” Steve says with a shrug, even if he’s not quite sure that’s true. The world has proven to him that there’s always  _ something  _ to fight. 

“Mmmh, you’d find something to fight if you wanted to darlin,” Bucky says, seeming only half serious as he sets the bowl aside and moves around to Steve’s front, taking a place in Steve’s lap, thighs bracketing Steve’s waist and his arms settled around Steve’s shoulders. 

There’ll be dye all over Bucky’s arms after, purple and blue splotches that Steve will later trace with his fingers and use to insist that Bucky’s a work of art, but Steve doesn’t point that out now, instead tipping his face up like he’s basking in Bucky’s light and receiving a kiss for his effort. 

“There’s others that’ll do better than me right now,” Steve says, tipping his head forward until they’re pressed together, forehead to forehead and nose to nose, “I’m tired, Buck.”

Warm hands with fading calluses cup his face, and Bucky presses their foreheads together harder, something soft and insistent there when Bucky says “Pal, if anyone’s got a right to be tired it’s you.” 

“I slept for damn near 70 years, Buck. I was  _ given _ this body- I should-” 

“Should what?” Bucky cuts him off, something sharp there. 

And Steve- Steve doesn’t have an answer to that. He  _ doesn’t.  _ Because he’s not sure what he’d wanted from Bucky in this conversation. Permission? Validation? A fight? Bucky insisting he owes it to the world to keep fighting? 

He’ll never get the last. He doesn’t think he  _ wants  _ the last. He’s tired. 

He’s  _ tired.  _

“Steve,” Bucky’s voice is gentle as he pulls back, his hands still wrapped around Steve’s jaw, keeping him there, keeping him focused on Bucky, “ _ Sweetheart.  _ There’s no one in this whole goddamn world that deserves a fucking break more than you. You served your time. You’ve been to war- too many times. You’ve done  _ enough. _ You don’t owe anyone jack shit. Never did.” 

Steve lets the words wash into him, Bucky’s stubborn expression filling his whole world, the same way  _ Bucky  _ manages to fill his whole damn world. And then he nods, a short jerky thing against Bucky’s hands, but still  _ enough  _ apparently. 

“Now, tell me you’re retiring again,” Bucky orders, dropping his hands until they’ve settled onto Steve’s chest, tracking a blotch of bright purple dye onto Steve’s shirt. 

“I think I’m gonna retire pal.” 

“Good. I want to retire properly then. Travel. Start a garden. All that old people nonsense,” Bucky says, and Steve- 

Well, Steve’s not willing to deny him anything, not then, so he nods and says “Sure thing Buck,” and feels something else in him settle. 

  
  


Steve sits on a beach somewhere in California where it’s colder than Steve expected and the wind sends a chill into his bones. 

Bucky sits beside him, toes digging into the sand, watching as a couple walks a dog along the beach in the distance. 

For the first time in a long time Steve’s fingers itch for a pencil so that he can capture this moment of stillness, Bucky in a soft sweater, fingertips curled into the ends of the sleeves, his hair blowing in a whirlwind around his head and something open and soft playing across his face. 

“Steve,” Bucky says after a while, leaning against Steve, shoulders and heads angled together, blue tangling with dark brown, palms and fingers curled together, “Let’s go home after this.” 

“Yeah,” Steve breathes, feeling like the whole word is suddenly stretched out in front of him for the first time in a long time, “Let’s go home.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on twitter @attackofthezee


End file.
